Perplexity

Ads to AI Agents Face Measurement Challenges

Digiday's Media Briefing (Aug 20, 2026) examines the emerging race to measure and attribute ads served to AI agents and explains why the industry has not agreed on a standard approach. The briefing highlights measurement and attribution challenges for ads delivered into conversational/agentic interfaces, and points to recent industry moves — such as Perplexity blocking Time’s ads and Time beginning to serve ads to AI agents — that underscore both commercial opportunity and policy friction. The piece is part of Digiday+’s weekly Media Briefing series for subscribers and situates the issue alongside related publisher-adtech developments.

Privacy Gateway filters sensitive data before ChatGPT

Researchers at FernUniversität Hagen developed a prototype called Privacy Gateway that automatically recognises and removes sensitive information from user prompts before they are sent to large language models. The system uses a "codebook" that encodes legal definitions from GDPR (Articles 4 and 9) and German trade-secret law to justify why data must be protected, distinguishing it from simple keyword-based redaction. The prototype was evaluated in a study using an extensive dataset of everyday scenarios (DOI provided); results show the filter reliably anonymises many sensitive items but there is a trade-off: in prompts containing extensive personal data (e.g., detailed medical cases) removing information can substantially degrade answer quality. The article notes wider concerns about routine, unintentional sharing of personal data with AI tools and cites a Bitkom survey that one-third of Germans use AI at least weekly.

Perplexity’s Airtel bundle drove millions of Indian users

Perplexity partnered with Indian telecom Airtel in July 2025 to give Airtel customers a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription. The promotion produced a large surge in downloads and monthly active users in India (5.9M downloads in July 2025; 56M downloads across seven months; MAU peak ~22M in October). As the earliest free subscriptions began expiring in mid-2026, in-app purchase and subscription revenue in India rose, suggesting some users either converted to paid plans or did not cancel auto-renewals. Independent app-intelligence firms Sensor Tower and Appfigures provided the usage and revenue estimates. The results are an early test of whether carrier-bundled free AI access can produce durable paying customers in India’s price-sensitive market.